The Three Fates
by EssayOfThoughts
Summary: The Fates are three: The Spinner and the Measurer, and the Cold Cutting Blade. Life is but a cloth to them, as thoughts are to Wanda, and all things woven can be cut. Sequel to Interlude, in turn a sequel to Dis Manibus, in turn a sequel to Shattered Dreams and Broken Stele, in turn a sequel to The Dead Do Not Bury Thsemselves. Part 5 - and the end - of my Memento Mori Series.
1. Atropos

**Summary:**

The Fates are three: The Spinner and the Measurer, and the Cold Cutting Blade. Life is but a cloth to them, as thoughts are to Wanda, and all things woven can be cut.

* * *

 **Atropos**

It was a bright day that Wanda was taken. Bright and beautiful, sunny and clear, and they were in the woods about the base. Pietro darted through trees, Vision quietly floated through and watched the birds, and Andrej set frost dancing over leaves in beautiful curlicues. Wanda watched the sky, felt the minds around her happy, and was glad.

Wanda did not see the minds encased in metal, for to her they were not there. They were robots and not men and she could not sense them as she had not sensed Ultron for all she had Vision and Pietro both. The robots slip a needle in her arm so she is pliable, and they sneak her away.

The first warning they have is Pietro feeling the pinch-pinch-pinching of his sister's skin, the one which happens when she is more than a mile gone from him. She did not say she was going so far.

 _Wanda?_ his mind sends the darting silver thought to hers and finds it sluggish and coagulating blood. He rushes into her mind. _WANDA!_

The connection between them is slack. It has always been bright, been singing, even when they sleep it is live with love, singing with songs of memories and emotions, it is always active and now it hangs slack and empty. Wanda sends no scarlet. Pietro runs, runs toward her mind, narrows the gap feels the pinch-pinch-pinching on his skin from Wanda's mind recede.

He runs and he runs, and barely notices Vision's question, slipped through from his passage to Wanda's mind and thus to his. _Pietro?_

It takes three calls from the android to reach him. _Pietro!_

 _Wanda_. It is his only reply. He runs on and sees an aircraft take off. He locks his sights on it, locks his _everything_ on the wings of that plane and follows as fast as he can, leaving a silver trail through the edge of the forest. _Wanda Wanda Wanda_ sings his mind, focussed like an arrow toward his sister. All the wood of his tree might as well be arrows, for all his will is directed toward _her_ , inescapably.

It is his sister they are taking from him, his twin, and he will not let it stand.

He runs. He runs and runs, down Interstates and through fields, through street and city, between cars and trucks and people he runs and runs as the plane pulls upwards and farther ahead. He feels the moment his sister wakes and sends _Wanda_ wreathed in rich blue gladness.

 _Where am I?_ she asks but more to herself than to him. _It's these people_ , she sends, along with images of two robot faces, terrifyingly similar to Ultron's secondaries, and the back of one pilot's head, and then, _it hurts_ , and the pinch-pinch-pinching but more like infected wasp stings, hornet stings, dog bites and butcher's hooks through flesh. Each metre further distant from him she is the more it hurts her. In a few minutes it is like flaying, like salt on open wounds like burning like… he feels the agony from her mind from the bond, he feels her head clunk onto steel and nothing else but a burning pain, a pain that brings up when he died in Novi Grad, and then…

He sees the plane but he falls to his knees. He screams in the middle of the field because he can no longer feel his sister and the last he felt was agony, was her memory of his death, of his body sinking to the ground, and all there is is her pain still running through his nerves and he screams and screams in the midst of the corn until Vision finds him.

* * *

Vision's hand falls light on his shoulder. "Pietro?"

His throat is hoarse. He does not have it in him to scream any longer and all he can do is sob and weep, water the ground with his tears and wish he was strong enough to tear it apart, to tear the plants down, to turn it back, to take back time and keep his sister safe at his side. He had wandered too far, he had let them close and she was gone gone gone.

Vision's hand whispers through the air over his head.

"I cannot see it," he says. His voice is soft and gentle and riddled through with sorrow. "The bond. It's sheared off again, with just your blue here."

Pietro sobs because the last time the connection was broken was when he had died.

* * *

Andrej catches up with them as Vision is helping Pietro back. He can barely stand on his own, and does not speak. Vision's face is solemn as he half-carries Pietro toward the base. Andrej sees his old friend, and the new android, and does not need to ask what has happened. He pulls out his tablet, and brings up messaging.

 _Widow: Wanda was taken. Vision, Pietro and I are headed back. Something bad happened out there._

The reply is almost instantaneous.

 ** _Plane or car?_**

Andrej shows the tablet to Vision, who points at plane.

 _Plane. Pietro ran after it._

 ** _Running checks on all GOI and suspicious plane activity._**

* * *

When they get in Vision leads Pietro toward medical. The medics there frown mightily as he waves them all off, but he does not think he can take their touch right now. Vision is not human, and does not count, but with the bond to his sister gone it feels odd to touch anyone at all. He feels like he is floating, the way he does when he is running as fast as his speed allows, or when he is dancing in the space of his sister's mind. The lightness that means a freedom from the world, even as he sits, still and stunned, on the edge of the bed, and pushes away another medic.

"No," he says, and his voice is hoarse. "Leave me alone."

Fury comes stomping down, boots and great flapping coat, after only a moment.

"What's this I hear you lost your sister?"

Pietro almost _snarls_ , he did not lose her, she had been _taken_ , stolen away by someone who meant nothing good, and had escaped.

"We can't get her back if you don't talk."

Pietro digs nails so hard into his palms he almost breaks flesh, but he talks.

* * *

"Hm," Fury says, when he is done. "Robots. That's a novel idea. And they must have had time to notice what you all do when you're out there to plan for it, we'll need to improve that perimeter."

"What about Wanda?" Pietro asks. In his mind the wind whistling through the lianas is singing her name, _Wandawandawandawanda_ as fast as the wind will carry it. He feels bare without the bond there, empty without Wanda's mind constantly updating his memories, checking his mind over, hiding from him the nightmare memories that creep up on both of them without Wanda's constant tending. They have shared their own minds so long, even with his swirling boundary, that without it he feels bereft. It is more than wanting his sister back. He needs her back like he needs air and sanity. Unbidden thoughts rise, Wanda's glowing red memory of his own death, Wanda's pain funnelled down the bridge, pain and pain and pain beyond anything she'd ever let him see from his testing the limit of their bond in training. He gasps in shock when Vision's hand comes down lightly on his back.

"I am sure," Vision says, his voice soft, "Your sister will do all she can to return here, and with her gifts they will not be able to stop her. She has only just got you back. I do not think she will let herself be parted from you for long."

The android's words, are, in truth, what Pietro has needed to hear. No quiet hint that the pain might have been Wanda's death, Wanda's heart giving out with the straining of keeping their bond in place. No hint of it being forever. Just certainty that Wanda will return. Pietro looks forward, through the howling cacophony of his wind's grief, and knows how Wanda would chose to return, scarlet dancing, lashing together the bridge as soon as sight and proximity allowed, looping the ropes of red through his mind, anchoring around the roots and branches of his tree as they ever did, as they were meant to. In his mind Pietro sits on a branch and rubs a great raw groove in the bark, where the last threads of scarlet fade in his bright blue light without Wanda's pulsing bloodied cathedral to warm it. He stretches out the stunted limbs of his own blue toward where Wanda's scarlet had always been, and he waits as the others decide what they will do.

* * *

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	2. Lachesis

**Lachesis**

Andrej sits with the Widow, as she taps over her tablet, and sends things skimming onto his own. Group of interest after group of interest, potential lead after potential lead. They throw the information they find back and forth, and when Pietro does not respond to Vision's attempts to help him, the android joins them to.

Andrej does not feel the cold any more - if anything he _is_ the cold - but his fingers are blue and shaking, his heart clenched close in his chest, his skin feeling too small. It was the fear he had felt when his city had flown, but worse because there was no Wanda, no adoptive elder sister to fight for them.

He remembered feeling the scarlet, wending its way through the city, as it touched his mind, recoiled in recognition, and sent a swift warning to him. _Get out_ , it had said, more aware than the vague shapes reflected in its winding way, _Get out before this city dies, Snowsmoke._ He had stood, when Wanda's mind had said that, gathered his things, and run for the bridge. When he realised it was gone, that his city flew, he anchored himself with the knowledge the twins were there, would fight for them, and waited with so many others.

This was not Novi Grad. Andrej's fingers tapped faster, and he searched through datastream after datastream to find Wanda.

* * *

When Wanda wakes she does not know where she is. The last thing she remembers is the plane, and pain, and feeling her connection to her brother snap with distance, and the up-summoned memory of when he had died in Novi Grad. She feels for minds around her, and finds them all, sparkling in different colours. She finds no mind wrapped in winds and centred on a flowering tree set with lianas and monkeys and hummingbirds. She finds no silver and blue for her mind to latch to. She stretches farther, and feels no mind of ice, nor of neurons, nor the briefly perceived minds she knows as the other Avenger's'.

The scarlet starts to drain from her mind, into her fingertips and into her eyes. Like blood it is washed out of the cathedral, leaving grey stones stained cerise as Wanda decides _these people do not matter_. Only one thing matters and that is finding her brother again. One piece of scarlet she summons back to her mind and makes a falcon of it, a kite with a tail as red as blood.

 _Find my brother_ , she charges the bird. _Tell him I am coming. His mind looks like_ _ **this**_ _._ The bird takes her image - blue and silver and swirling grey - in its sharp talons, stretches its wings, and flies. Wanda stands.

The room she is in is small, not much larger than the cells they had been given at the castle run by the Baron and Doctor List. She sends tendrils prowling and prying into the minds nearby, and tears a map from one mind, a location from another, and the memories of coordinates and plots from a third. These people have taken her from her brother, for reasons of their own, and she is careful to set angry scarlet fear scything through each their minds as she unlocks the doors that keep her from her freedom.

* * *

She scrys her way down the passages with the eyes of the guards waiting. When she is sure a space is clear - no robots, no other people - she severs useful memories from the mind she had used, and sets madness into the mind like gnawing worms. One mind tells her that most of robots were powered down, and she sets it to destroying them completely before charging her scarlet to drive the mind to madness. She continues on through the building, and finds her way into daylight, and to the plane.

* * *

She is halfway to the plane when she feels her hurtling falcon careen into Pietro's mind. It is encased in his blue, surrounded by it, and Pietro understands. She is alive yet.

* * *

"Pietro?" Andrej's voice is small, and ice dances through the air from his breath.

Pietro is shaking, not from cold, but speaks. "Her scarlet. Wanda's alive."

"Where is she?" Natasha asks the question before even Vision does, and Pietro shakes his head.

"I don't know. All she said is that she is coming. That she will be here soon."

Now Vision does speak. " _How_?"

A file slides onto Nat's tablet, sent by Maria. She taps it open, flicks her fingers to scroll through it, and flicks the file toward Vision and Andrej.

"Plane," she says, and lifts her tablet slightly. "We've found her."

Andrej skims the file, pale eyes darting. Vision's eyes shut, just a moment, as he absorbs the information into the great databanks of his mind.

"HYDRA," Andrej breathes, and glances to Natasha. "Do they think they have some right to her, because they gave her powers? They-"

"They didn't give her powers," Pietro whispers, all the way across the room from them. "The sceptre did, or the stone in it. Some quirk in our DNA gave us the powers. They were just the means." He slips off the bed, feet dropping unevenly to the floor with a soft sound. He holds himself tensely, like everything still hurts, but walks to join them. "They have no right to my sister." The way his words curl in the phrase, wrap around _my sister_ like a psalm or prayer, or sacred rosary, suggests that no one has a claim to Wanda but he and her.

Vision hums a small noise, and extends a hand to Natasha and Andrej's tablets. "That plane went there, only half an hour ago. It had barely refuelled before the camera S.H.I.E.L.D. has there captured this clip."

Andrej enlarges the file he was sent, as Natasha focusses on the tail of the plane, finding the numbers to identify it. Andrej, hands shaking anew, lifts the tablet, holds it out to Pietro. The image on it is clear.

Wanda, red and black and eyes a-glowing, stalking with eyes of only scarlet towards the plane. There is no brown visible.

The clip is only a few seconds long, but Pietro sees scarlet thrown to dismantle a robot about to grab her, tearing it apart at the joints, and scarlet sent to twist a mind to madness. He knows the curlicues for messages, for memories, for making a bond and for destroying it, and knows the one she threw at the man with the HYDRA badge was one which would tear him to pieces.

* * *

Wanda stole the memories from the pilot as she passed him. Froze him with her scarlet, working counter to all her brother's speed on a human with none of it, and delved into his mind, finding the memories of his learning, and uprooting them in full. She files the memories into her mind like books, and sets them, side by side by side, on the lectern of her mind's pulpit, on the music stand of her choir's conductor, on the stands of her choir and of her mind's great pipe organ.

 _Dies Irae_ rises from the ranks of golden and cerise thought, and Wanda plots her course home.

A single scarlet shrike separates from her whirling red mass of viperous ropes, and skims through the world toward her brother.

* * *

"She's got the plane," Pietro says, his eyes clenching tight shut. "She took the memories of how to fly it from… someone. She sent someone to destroy the rest of their robots." His eyes open, his shoulders relax, his mouth half-smiles. "She will be here soon."

There is a silver blur as he sets down the tablet and runs outside.

Those remaining look at each other, glancing, eyes to eyes to robotic eyes. They follow on.

* * *

Pietro waits outside. The air is cool, the wind is strong, the sun is bright and Pietro sends his stunted cerulean outwards hoping and hoping that just this once they will have the magic of his sister and be able to know when she draws near.

* * *

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	3. Clotho

**Clotho**

The plane lands, somewhat bumpily, on the grass outside the base. Pietro is already running toward it as it slows, and the door opens, pushed down by flooding scarlet as rich a red as blood. The wave is more than Pietro has ever known it to be, wide, redder, more like blood, and carrying more wrath than Pietro has ever known. He has known his sister's great wroth at being taken from him, at being asked to work far from him, but this is brighter, bolder, and wilder. Pietro's silver sings ever brighter, sings swifter, and he hurtles to a halt at the foot of the steps.

As soon as she appears in the doorway he breathes out, "Wanda," and she flies down the steps, scarlet lashing between them, anchoring their minds together. Pietro feels the _Dies Irae_ of her mind more than hears it; it sings so loud and low through the pipe organ. Pietro pushes memories of the _Te Deum_ , of the _Non Nobis Domine_ , of how Wanda could think when kindly, down the remade bridge and tries to follow its way through the bridge, watching as the great strength of scarlet, forced outwards, seeps back in, red thread after coiling red. It loops around the candelabras of Wanda's mind, around the pews. It fills in the font with rich red ropes of blood, and drips from the candles like hot wax. The scarlet tinges her memories bright and warm again, and sinks back into the rock, turning cerise scarlet, even as her brother's cerulean follows the last threads in. Empathy returns as her powers cease to be all movement, and settle into her mind.

They are stood, at the base of the steps to the ladder, foreheads pressed together, hands looped in hair, and Wanda's scarlet soothing from lashing ropes like a skirt of vipers, to a single swirl of silk.

"They are _dead_ ," Wanda says, and it is a vicious, brutal, ugly snarl, like the scabbing scarlet at the edges of her mind. "They are _dead_ ," She says, and it is a sob, and all the sorrow of driving to suicide men she did not need to kill. Pietro cradles his sister to him, and offers no judgement. Offers no censure. Offers only comfort, and a skein of silver love, which loops around the candelabra of her mind's cathedral.

"It's alright," He murmurs. _I still love you_ , He sends, _And so does Andrej. Vision cannot judge you for this, and the Widow will not try._ He sends still more silver, looping and diving through his sister's scarlet, tying the scarlet so it will not leave her cathedral to go cerise, as the others draw nearer.

* * *

Wanda is curled close to Pietro when Vision and Andrej and the Widow all arrive. As they walked nearer the twins sank onto the grass, Pietro wrapped around his sister like a shield, and when they arrive by the plane they can see Wanda's back, and Wanda's hair, and Pietro's burning blue gaze. Wanda is frighteningly still against her brother, barely breathing, and but for the rare hitches of her shoulders they might think her close to death.

Andrej plops neatly down into the grass, legs crossed, and watching Pietro. "Wanda?" He asks.

Pietro's hand strokes quickly through his twin's hair, and gently tugs Wanda closer to him. "She needs to rest. She did more than she should have had to alone."

"Should she be taken inside?" It is Vision who asks, and he who pings off a simple, _She is back, but will stay outside_ , when Pietro shakes his head.

"She needs air, and no minds pressing in around her."

Andrej nods, and stands. His small pale hand slips into Vision's magenta, and tugs the android back toward the building. Vision's eyes linger, briefly, on Wanda, his face filled with worry, before he lets himself be led away.

* * *

Wanda's mind is bright and swirling, and sends a rich wave of _glad_ and _warm_ and _grateful_ towards Pietro as the others leave. Pietro sends back an even simpler sliver of his silver. _Always_.

That has ever been his promise. He will always protect her, always aid her, always give her what he can and what she needs. There is very little he would not do for his sister, and all depend on how well he can keep the rest of his promise. The steady trickle of Wanda's mind's lifeblood into his is comforting, a great scarlet fall, feeding his tree stronger. His stunted cerulean shows hopes of growing, of being able to find Wanda even as she finds him, and that is all he could really care for. In turn Wanda rests in his mind, following the flow of her scarlet, around the roots and into them, feeding into greater brightness the blooms of each bough. The branches scarred by the loss of the bond are wrapped warm again, bonds of scarlet, reinforced with black, anchored with solid burnished gold looped around silver and grey and burning-bright blue.

 _I think_ , Wanda sends, gentle as the flow of her scarlet around the roots of Pietro's tree, _I know what happened._

Pietro's mind is full of his presence, and his whole mind expresses patient curiosity.

 _Someone told. They_ \- her mind flashes up a dozen images, faces of people as her scarlet darted madness into their minds – _Had been told by someone of the place and a series of times. I don't know who. But either there was a traitor or that was supposed to be a test._

In the real world Pietro's hand strokes through his sister's hair. In their minds Pietro sends silver, shining, blue, bright, and grim grey swirls all a dancing. _If there is a traitor_ , He says, _We must find them. If that was a test…_ His mental voice cuts off suddenly, ominously. Wanda's scarlet rises from its riverbed, and loops around branches.

 _You may kill_ , Wanda sends. _I do not wish to. But you may._

Pietro's branches dip, with the weight of water and Pietro's will. _Not if you do not want me to._

Wanda's scarlet bubbles, not quite happiness, but amusement, which is close enough to ease some of Pietro's worry. _You may_ , She sends. _I will not stop you. I did much worse when you were taken from me._

In the real world Pietro's head bows to his sister's and presses kisses to her hair. Wanda's fingers loop into his hair, grip the neck of his shirt, even as Pietro's arms hold her closer. They are wrapped around each other like children in the womb, like plants grown and growing together, like they are as nature means them to be. Wanda breathes a long breath out, and Pietro, at last, relaxes.

* * *

 **Finis**

* * *

Reviews are much appreciated! This is the end of this series, but I have two three-parter fics due to go up shortly and a large number of oneshots which will probably be bundled into one on-going fic. Keep an eye on my page if you would like to read more fic like this, as I won't be updating past fics to alert readers as to what I've added -you'll have to actually check my stories. I have plenty more to come.


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